Dylan among finalists for book awards

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Bob Dylan, the unofficial poet laureate of the rock'n'roll
generation, has now been officially placed alongside such literary
greats as Philip Roth and Adrienne Rich, not to mention biographies
of Shakespeare and Willem de Kooning.

All were among the nominees announced yesterday for the National
Book Critics Circle (NBCC) prizes.

Dylan, whose memoir Chronicles, Vol. 1 was a favourite
with both reviewers and readers, is among the finalists for
biography/autobiography, his competition including two acclaimed
best sellers: Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton and
Stephen Greenblatt's biography of Shakespeare.

Also nominated were John Guy's Queen of Scots: The True Life
of Mary Stuart, and De Kooning: An American Master by
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.

Most literary efforts by rock stars, from the Kinks' Ray Davies
to Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan, are laughed off by critics, but
Dylan has been praised for an unusually rich and engaging book,
writing passionately about such influences as Woody Guthrie and
Robert Johnson and recalling his years as a young singer-songwriter
in Greenwich Village.

Dylan, who, more than anyone, inspired rock'n'rollers to think
of themselves as poets, recounts his often mysterious past in an
offhand, non-linear style, from reading Civil War-era newspapers in
the New York Public Library to sharing a hamburger backstage with
Tiny Tim.

Roth, whose omission from the finalists for the National Book
Awards was widely criticised, was cited by the NBCC for The Plot
Against America, his dsytopian novel of the United States under
the presidency of Charles Lindbergh.

Fellow fiction nominees include another prominent book bypassed
for the National Book Award, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead;
Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker and two British releases,
Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty
and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a Booker finalist.

Books published overseas in English are also eligible for the
book critics prize.

Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice, winner of the National Book
Award for non-fiction, was among the nominees for general
non-fiction. The other finalists were Edward Conlon's Blue
Blood, Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History,
David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America and
Timothy B Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story.

The poetry finalists included two of the most prominent poets of
the past 40 years - Adrienne Rich, nominated for The School
Among the Ruins, and Gary Snyder, for Danger on Peaks.
The other finalists were DA Powell's Cocktails, Brigit
Pegreen Kelly's The Orchard and James Richardson's
Interglacial.

Richard Howard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, was among the
nominees for criticism, for the anthology Paper Trail: Selected
Prose 1965-2003. Also nominated was one of the world's most
prominent critics, James Wood, for The Irresponsible Self,
and Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael, a book about two
former NBCC finalists, Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. The other
finalists for criticism were Patrick Neate's Where You're At:
Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet and Graham Robb's
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century.

A lifetime achievement award will be given to Louis D Rubin Jr,
founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a North Carolina-based
publisher known for such Southern writers as Jill McCorckle and
Clyde Edgerton.

The awards ceremony will take place on March 18, although a
victory for Dylan will do more for his status than for his bank
account: there are no cash prizes.

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a
not-for-profit organisation of about 600 book editors and
critics.